Dear Customer,

Customer – you mean whom?

I often refer to Ken Haemer’s famous phrase on how to build a good presentation to how to build a great product:

”Designing a presentation (product) without an audience (a customer) in mind is like writing a love letter and addressing it to whom it may concern.”

But. I am taking my words back or more closely, focusing on the phrase more specifically. If you only think of a customer, I believe you are still talking to whomever. Often, we rush to concentrate on the doing, instead of pausing for whom. Yet for me, everything begins with the ”who”. If the ”who” is not defined well enough, it might as well be ”whomever”. The ”who” further defines why, how and, what.

I recently discussed with a client wishing to probe into the expectations of a certain customer group by having me facilitate an ideation workshop with the focus group. The client invited to workshop customers all with similar backgrounds. I confronted the client to ensure authentic feelings and opinions of the focus group instead of presumptions of the all-same-group. I hate presumptions.

When conducting a fieldwork, let’s say studying farmers in West Java, you do not study bankers, land owners and school children for feelings of farmers. Or, as a more comprehensible example, if the objective is to learn the experience of vehicle drivers, one does not concentrate on engineers building the vehicles (right?!) or on the drivers’ spouses. Choose your key informant well! In any fieldwork or anthropological study, key informants can save or kill your study. Same applies to product development.

It is simply useless to ask the right question if you ask the wrong person. Think of asking for specific directions from a tourist. You will only get lost. Try observing the waiter if you want to learn how to make a dish. You will end up with nice catering but with a less desired meal. Analyzing tickets from the wrong cue is like staring at the pillar on the front porch when your focus should be on a pillar on the backyard. Think how often we focus on a poorly defined customer. Do not even ask me.

To help you to get started, let me give you straightforward hints (read: answers). If you are at the start of creating the product (or service), you ought to send your love letter to dear User. You may also consider writing to influencers (whether they are Buyers or Investors, but surely by now, you know how to define them).

Once you prepare the product (service) for the market, love letters are most often sent to dear User and dear Buyer. It is like sending love letters within a family: each deserves a different kind of a letter as you don’t send the same love letter to your spouse as you do to your children.

Once the product (service) is out in the market, you may have written before bunch of love letters to Buyers, devoting your love in television, occupying the front page of the main newspaper to confess your deepest sentiments but not today. Today a professional marketing poet, addresses his/her love letter not to Buyer but to dear Google Algorithm.

So, dear friend, whom do you address your love letter to?

To know your customer – market or persona – and defining it well, is one of the first steps to excel in customer experience. Download the Winning Customer Experience guide.